The Army owes it to its tradition of discipline to ensure crimes like the Assam fake encounter never happen again

There are many things than can, and do, go wrong when you deploy the Army which is trained to ruthlessly and without mercy eliminate external enemies on internal security duties. No officer or jawan wants to be in a situation where they have to take on their people, i.e. fellow citizens of India. Yet, the political leadership in India has for decades turned to the men and women in olive green to quell armed insurgencies in various parts of the country when their counterparts in khaki were either co-opted by those who have taken up arms against the state or proved singularly ineffective in facing them down. This is not by way of an apologia for the excesses of the Indian Army but to contextualise the situation in which seven of its personnel, including a Major General, two Colonels, two captains and two JCOs have been held guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment at the conclusion of a Summary General Court Martial into a fake encounter that took place in Assam in 1994 in which five innocent youth were killed.

It is to the credit of a brave Jagadish Bhuyan, who has been pursuing the case doggedly for 24 years, that justice was finally done. It is also to the credit of the Indian Army which does, as it should, hold itself to a higher standard. Indeed, as Bhuyan himself asserted, the trial and verdict showed that the Army exemplified the best traditions of fairness and neutrality even when it came to their own who had transgressed. The specifics of the case are not important, though it is worth mentioning that the killings took place in the Tinsukia district where the Army men picked up nine student leaders suspected of being ULFA militants and gunned five of them down before releasing the other four into the jungles.

What is quite remarkable is that a number of witnesses were encouraged to come forward and were heard at length by the Army judicial authorities which can only happen when there is trust that the machinery of the justice delivery system will protect them. The Indian Army owes it to its own tradition of discipline and zero tolerance towards human rights violations to ensure such crimes are never repeated. The exemplary punishment awarded through due process to the guilty is another step in that direction.